Posts by Wellyboot

Meta fights Ofcom over how many billions count as billions

Re: If Meta wants to be fined on their UK revenues

I'm not aware of any Meta involvement in running critical UK infrastructure, so until fines are paid OFCOM could just outright ban them. Many politicos would trample each other to climb onto that bandwagon (Billions more cash for the government).

Meta Zuck would have to choose between a massive* one-off fine or the loss of all the ongoing UK revenue. This would be an 'encouraging others' event for lots of countries with similar legislation.

* relative to most fines, but only a fraction of this years Meta AI cash burn.

Meta U-turns on encryption push for Instagram as DMs go plaintext

Given Excuse - Think of the children

Actual Reason - Feeding the AI

Age checks could turn internet into an ID checkpoint, complains Proton CEO

Re: He understated the problem

Indeed parents should be able to exercise judgement, I was allowed almost unrestricted access to armoured vehicles* on many occasions before the UK age of criminal responsibility, though after I could reach the pedals there was always a 'minder' about for some bizarre reason!

*with quite large guns installed.

Re: Not the internet

You don't have to be communist to think Elon is a <insert multiple expletives here>. Like all the tech Bros. he just doesn't care about other peoples opinions.

His companies however do employ an awful lot of people doing good things and that's important.

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

Re: cut your involvement with people like that

By providing cover for Seabee Bulldozers!

Recovering several thousand tons of dirt and some little flags on sticks to the US.

Re: Heard and McDonald Islands

The oil is real, but while Argentina is claiming everything belongs to them no company will risk the massive upfront cost of drilling in waters which are at least as nasty as the North sea.

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

Re: Keyloggers???!!!

personal stuff is done on the mobile phone. !!!!

Swapping Meta snooping for Google snooping.

NASA Inspector fears new spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

Re: In the spirit of international cooperation (yeah as if this will happen)

Now now, stop using common sense to prevent an easily foreseeable problem.

Re: robots

That's engineering / scientific reason for using robots for the last half century, easier, cheaper and safer.

The political reason for putting humans on the moon is to make the point "Our people are there with boots on the ground", quite literally skin in the game because humans in general don't regard 'things' anywhere near as important as humans.

Re: spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

Basically there was no expected scenario where an explosion involving the O2 tanks would leave the spacecraft in any way operational. (as opposed to confetti).

The Apollo 13 filter issue was that the two man Lunar module filters were having to support three astronauts for most of the round trip and the LM/suit filters carried were just not up to that length of mission.

It was a trade-off made with launch mass & physical space requirements being in mind.

WorldCoin's newest pitch: Scan your eyeballs to prove AI agents really represent you

Re: A secure token

By next year AI images generated from billions of 50+megabit selfies will be good enough to fool any bio recognition software

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

Re: You owe me a new keyboard!

Yes for a small number of drones attacking at the same time, currently the relatively low cost of drones allows the ability to send enough to simply overload the defences.

The short term fix is to repeat the WW2 anti kamikaze tactics - quite literally filling any spare deck space with small auto-cannon* capable of firing proximity fused shells with multiple ships able to cover each other, it's the 'multiple ship' bit that the royal Navy isn't going to fix anytime soon.

*The Type-31 frigates under construction have one (forward) 57mm & two (one at each end) 40mm auto-cannon, a safer mix to account for system failures would be two & six giving multiple barrel coverage of any approach angle.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"

Many white goods manufacturers were still making reasonably well made and repairable items back then, our 2002 Miele has seen three sprog from nappies, through school (two runs a day every day) and now is doing the same for grand-sprog. total spares needed - two sets of replacement motor brushes (15ish mins to swap out), one set of shock dampers (also a 15 min swap) & one motor relay on the PCB requiring a machine strip down and attention from the solder iron (£2.50 in parts to avoid a £250.00 replacement PCB assembly). I've no idea how long the drum bearing will last but I'll wager its replaceable as well.

DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom

Re: Mass Dickensian destitution inbound?

35 hrs per week of a near pointless activity leaving precious little time to learn any new skill set, unless of course there's a free AI doing the applications, after all it'll be another AI deciding if they've been busy enough. UBI at best is the state subsidising employers, at worst just another name for unemployment benefits.

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: Wait until Facewatch is hacked

You should never need to demonstrate your innocence, it’s a given until proven otherwise.

Spreading unjustified accusations is an offence covered by libel & slander laws, which could be financially suicidal for Facewatch if they cannot prove the crimes attributed to any face in their system.

Accusation of theft* - tell the manager you're quite willing to wait (wherever they confronted you) until plod arrives (while calling plod yourself). Once you are outside their property anything the manager asks you to do such as allowing a search is simply an invitation that can be refused. When (hopefully not if) plod arrives you can let them confirm there’s no stolen property in your possession and ask for a grovelling apology.

*Serious enough to justify a citizens arrest should you attempt to leave, waiting peacefully for plod however basically means they have no reason to ever touch you.

IANAL but I’m getting old and intolerant of tech based BS as well as having worked alongside lawyers who would press the big red button over trivial things.

Re: Ban it

With any luck, one day soon a barrister* will be misidentified as a criminal by this system, The resulting slander case will make interesting reading!

* a high court judge would be even better

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

Re: Imagine that.

Quietly ignored as soon as the next money making bandwagon appears.

Has AI found an actually helpful place for blockchain yet?

Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

Re: Indicted

There has to be a scapegoat to take the blame for expensive product failures, even when it's a 'me-too' lump that just shows how well thought out the Ipad competition was.

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

I'd buy that, but I'm not going into print as to where I'd let it loose....

Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts

Re: they can start by…

The same R-Pi could certainly run the robot arm employed for using the coloured pencils...

Re: De-intellectualisation?

Skilled trades are quite often also knowledge workers, I'd be very surprised if all the people being binned were simply spanner monkeys performing simple part swap outs.

Maintenance at 1000 hours isn't a naively scheduled activity if the $maintained-thing$ was originally designed, built and (more importantly) safety certified with that interval in mind.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

I still have a Tektronix logo* t-shirt, a freebie option with printer long, long ago...

Re: During COVID

Totally agree about the Laserjet 5 series, I've seen these beasts rack up page counts over the 2 million mark (pallets of A4 paper arriving every Monday morning) with little more than the regular application of maintenance kits.

AI is making Google and Meta even stronger and richer

Re: Who's losing?

When the 2000 dot com bubble popped all the worried investors threw money into nice safe and relatively undervalued BANKING stocks, wait a while and hello to the 2007/8 financial crisis.

Given the price of gold, I think the smart money hasn't spotted the undervalued (not the same as under performing) currently safe sector yet.

That last sentence speaks volumes!

>>>Meta shares sank seven percent, probably because its net income slipped 83 percent year-over-year due to coughing up a one-time income tax charge of $15.93 billion.<<<

A one-time tax hit drops the company market value by ten times that amount.

Increasing the annual infrastructure spend (on just the AI line) to essentially five times that tax hit passes with barely a glance, volatile is becoming a tame description of the current tech market.

OpenAI non-profit will run for-profit that has yet to make a profit

Re: The Dot-Com Crash Was A Lot Of Fun

If by 'burn' you mean 'reallocate' cash to a far better* place I agree completely, market bubble speculation is just a game of 'find the lady' by suits in a nice office.

* in the 'Better mine than yours' sense.

OpenAI

Restructuring is a polite term whereby companies cut the actual value of individual debts while maintaining (preferably increasing) the 'book' value.

This isn't "a 10x return on Microsoft's $13.8 billion investment", this is just the next step along the path towards MS owning OpenAI outright and gaining enough of a hold on the market to easily justify the marginal risk (& cost). In the early years MS simply hired the developers, now they throw a small amount of cash at startups with interesting ideas and see which ducks float.

MS - spotting potentially great software ideas since day-1.

Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators

Re: So, what's the conversion process for an engine from Jet-A1 to Natural Gas?

To answer your first question, it may be almost that simple, the motor just needs the correct fuel/air mix to be pushed through the burners with the calorific value of the different fuels only affecting the consumption rate.

What you have next is a classic business case trade off situation.

The more you change on the motor converting it from an air blower to turning a genny the more efficient it becomes, the cheapest simplest fix is to literally bolt on a bigger gearbox & generator(Open cycle*), a full conversion has the turbine buried in a very complex heat exchanger & feedback loop to optimize the exhaust heat recovery (Closed cycle).

If the return on investment time for the efficient conversion doesn't beat the cheap (practically a bolt-on) solution during the expected wait time until grid connections can be made then we can all guess what's going to happen.

These converted jets won't go away in the long term either, they'll be kept as backup until the annual maintenance costs start to approach replacement cost by a more efficient system.

As for the Mercaptan issue (Sulfur), as long as the gas doesn't go wildly over the levels found in aviation kerosene the engines will operate.

* The exhaust heat (vast amounts) is lost.

Cheap as chips

These engines are first generation high bypass turbofans dating back 50+ years and can literally be found by the dozen in aircraft bone-yards, so they're a nice and simple motor to rework into gen-sets.

The AI bubble equivalent to selling picks & shovels during a gold rush.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Re: Operative word

Fully AI generated porn would be an instant hit with all the anatomically impossible positions it would create. (and the new human anatomies required for some requests.)

Re: Checking - I would rather not

Use AI to Identify all AI generated emails and to create a response, don't forget to have AI count the number of emails so processed and produce a daily 'time saved' report of giving the %number% * five minutes.

If the sender isn't looking at the emails they're sending, they're obviously not reading any incoming either.

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

from Randall Munroe too many years ago...

https://xkcd.com/908/

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

The removal of children from innocent parents is in itself an act of abuse, "for their protection" as a justification need's a high level of proof which could be obtained by having experts interviewing the children at home*. Social services staff know full well that the 'better safe than sorry' line is only pertaining to their personal future - better 100 innocents taken into care then returned rather than one left with 'suspects' while a complete lack of evidence exists - BT line information isn't evidence.

* this is where the system fails, instead they're interviewing probably terrified children at a strange location having been removed from their parents.

We're all going to be paying AI's Godzilla-sized power bills

Re: Unsustainable?

Even the most solid business model requires somebody willing to put up the cash (millions), willing to wait until payback (quite a few years) and most importantly not having a better investment option available.

Lower profit schemes are a winner if the payback time is short enough, plans with 100% profit after 10 years will die in a ditch if the alternative is 35% after three years.

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

Re: Only naked people

AI can help here

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Passive pass through was my first thought as well. Rack mounted DC kit is unlikely to be PoE so basically this box was redundant* but nobody had arranged the outage to directly connect the up & down stream devices possibly due to all the WFH going on at the time.

Either way, they were in sparking spurs mode.

* there's a small chance that it was a fully configured and deliberately powered off as a final get out of jail when SHTF.

Top 10 billionaires make nearly $64B in post-Trump election stock surge

Gold is at an all time high* until the Russian war ends so even that normally safe refuge is potentially a massive loss waiting to happen.

Re: Happy Ending

and not noticing they're missing another 990 somewhere else.

Weird ideas welcome: VC fund looking to make science fiction factual

Re: Star Trek tech

Another transporter question is why in the "delayed vaccine must get through" stories do they not just use transporters to filter out nasties every time it's used? this can't be slower than injecting everyone.

Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI

When the law of supply & demand kicks in, as it inevitably will

OpenAI GPT-5: great taste, less filling, now with 30% less bias

What is Ideologically neutral ?

Because there is a very wide spectrum of beliefs* it's self evident that a statistical middle ground is to be found.

The problem is that as an individuals beliefs move away from the actual middle they will start to develop a personal reference middle point for themselves that is also moving in their direction but at a slower pace, eventually the statistical middle starts to appear as deep in the 'far other sides' obviously wrong belief and so conspiracies are born.

Eventually belief becomes dogma from where no compromise can be tolerated, and history shows that bad things happen to the losing side in dogma driven conflicts.

* of all types, political, medical, ethical etc.

Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

Not as long as AMD can make money from it by actually supporting Linux hardware drivers for their offerings, Intel not going away after they've hobbled the driver support is a less certain bet.

Re: Good news everybody

Do he remember the last time Intel tried proprietary - Itanium

And how that worked out for AMD with X86-64

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Re: Barge?

Dredging a temporary channel can cover the depth issue (only a few $million). Both Cities will need to produce a quote for route preparation & reinstatement to a suitable waterside for the barge, that quote alone will eat a few more million dollars let alone the alterations needed (potentially 10s of $million?). 2,000 miles of Atlantic & Gulf travel isn't too clever by barge so a float-on/off sea lift ship is probably a preferred option just in case the weather decides not to play ball (lots more millions).

The core of engineers & Navy might be able do it for $15 million* by bulldozing a path to the water at both ends and requisitioning suitable ships but the locals will be a bit peeved by the mess.

* with some very creative accounting, the politicians specialty

Re: Tell me, Ted...

Both cities need to produce a costed quote for route preparation/reinstatement to a suitable waterside, that quote alone will probably eat a couple of million dollars at each end.

How chatbots are coaching vulnerable users into crisis

Re: Obsequious bots

Or it thinks you're David Cameron

Re: Obsequious bots

Treat yourself to a Taco-Bell tonight!

Be well !

Re: Obsequious bots

But if they start being honest with people, people will stop using them for every little thing! How will we be conditioned to accept that best course for us to take is to spend a mere few currency units everyday feeding the AI data-centre electric bill and the advertising mechanisms.

These things are just personal echo chambers.

How your mouse could eavesdrop on you and rat you out

Amazon can help here!!!!!

Their Basic mouse is only 1000DPI

I doubt a mouse can move that far listening to voice or clicks

UK Home Office opens wallet for £60M automated number plate project

Re: £60 million?

Analysis? - AI generated cut-n-paste from last ANPR exercise

and some fact finding trips